Last month, Ann Powers celebrated Madonna’s 53rd birthday by collecting her 53 favorite songs from the Material Girl. She posted suggestions on Twitter and I provided my picks along with several others. This went live shortly after Ellen Copperfield’s musings on Madge for This Recording and preceded Carilynn27′s Persephone post that twined Madonna’s music with autobiography and fandom. It also follows a sustained narrative of (predominantly white) women (and girls) taking about, listening to, and playing with Madonna. Lots of media studies criticism in the late 80s and into the 90s sought to understand Madonna as screen subject, fan object, and feminist star text. All of the stuff that will be written about Gaga will have to be built upon this body of work.
I came of age during this time, and remember listening to Madonna with my mother, a fan who didn’t think that allowing me to watch the video for “Like a Prayer” would make me a Satanist. Actually, it clued me in on Madonna being something of a racial fetishist. I also developed my nascent Madonna fandom during my pubescent years through my stepmother. I was fascinated by her outspoken love for Madonna, especially since it seemed so closely tied to adult sexual expression. As a ten-year-old girl, coming across a copy of Erotica was better than any of the Updike or Nin I snuck off my dad’s bookshelf at night. You can’t dance to Rabbit, Run. I also purloined my stepmom’s copy of Sex, which she tucked into the back of her closet.
Madonna; image courtesy of allaboutmadonna.com
Erotica was well-received critically, though underrated. Some thought Madonna ran out of ideas, or was just trying to shock people, or simply wasn’t sexy. A few critics claimed Erotica was too cold and calculated to be sexy. I think they miss the point–mediating an image of sexiness usually takes the sex out of it because sexuality tends to operate (and be obfuscated) at a subliminal level. Openly subverting expectations of feminine sexiness and reconfiguring what signifies as sexy for women causes a lot of discomfort. Power is an aphrodisiac, as long as it isn’t actually wielded by women. Many of the scenarios in the “Erotica” video are trite and regressive–lipstick lesbianism, celebrity friends, S&M, problematic assumptions about black sexuality. But I can’t imagine many contemporary pop stars exploring erotic menace or foregrounding explicitly queer images of sexuality in a mainstream context as Madonna did with Erotica, which was released during a time when AIDS casualties and HIV prevention were more greatly emphasized. Plus the album has “Rain” and “Bye Bye Baby,” which are two of my favorite songs. It also has “Did You Do It?,” which, as with all song where Madge raps, you should skip.
Gaga may come the closest to fulfilling Erotica‘s potential. There’s no question that Jo Calderone owes hir existence to Ralph Macchio, Annie Lennox, Andrew Dice Clay, Danny Zuko, and Lenny Bruce. But what I appreciated about Gaga’s drag performance at the VMAs was her commitment to it. She didn’t make any costume changes during the night to re-establish her femininity. She kept her breasts bound throughout the ceremony and didn’t wink at the camera. Sure, she was boorish for trying to kiss Britney, whose trembling bottom lip seemed to simultaneously telegraph “Is this a trick?”, “Should I?”, and “I don’t think my manager will approve.” But if you compare Gaga’s performance alongside Katy Perry’s egotistical assumption that a song like “Firework,” which vaguely addresses queer closeted identity by celebrating individual perseverance, is doing something good for the world when it merely aligns herself with a lucrative niche market, Gaga might be moving closer toward pop progress. But I hate “Born This Way” as both a pop song and a political message, so I’m actually hoping Janelle Monáe brings the sex and politics back to pop music. Androids need love too.
Sade; image courtesy soundonsound.com
But if we’re talking about pop music’s ability to inspire exciting sex, I can’t discredit an album I like a great deal more than Erotica. Sade’s Love Deluxe slunk into American record stores on October 20, 1992, the same day that Madonna’s fifth album initiated controversy. Janet Jackson’s janet. came out the following spring and is more potently erotic than Madonna’s offering, but I think that album requires its own post and a review of Poetic Justice. While many contemporaries sought reinvention to stay relevant, Nigerian British torch singer Sade Adu and her band continue to release reliably warm, enveloping jazz-pop for quiet storms, yacht rides, and power outages. I bought Love Deluxe on tape in junior high as a compromise. I wanted to see Indecent Proposal but my parents were like, “Ummmmm, absolutely not!” “No Ordinary Love” featured prominently in the trailer, so it sufficed until I finally saw Adrian Lyne’s sexist glamorization of kept women and poor business decisions at a girlfriend’s house. The scene in the kitchen is pretty hot, though. But “Kiss of Life,” “Cherish the Day,” and “I Couldn’t Love You More” are way hotter.
I don’t want to set up a racist, misogynistic binary wherein white female pop stars are cold sexbots and female pop stars of color have erotic energy coursing through their veins. Nor do I want to overlook that Sade’s songs assume heterosexual coupling. But Sade’s articulation of sexuality is predicated on the assumption that these forms of expression are something people do together. Also, sexuality isn’t the only lens through which Sade explores empathy and human connection. Despite the luxe atmosphere Sade’s music often seems to cultivate, many of her songs focus on poverty and the struggle for basic survival. Two such songs on Love Deluxe are “King of Pain” and “Pearls.” The latter track, which is about a poor Somalian woman, always makes me tear up a little. It may be a bit paternalistic in its storytelling, but it’s no less effective.
Thus, I think Sade’s articulation of the erotic is at least as powerful and enduring. Others seem to agree. Molly Lambert recently saw Sade in concert and raved about the performance, Sade’s enduring sexiness, and the sense of community the event created. Ms. Adu turns 53 next January. Let’s remember to wish her a happy birthday.
Kara Walker at work; image courtesy of walkerart.org
Destroyer’s Kaputt came out last Tuesday. As a longtime fan of Dan Bejar’s main project, I’ve been pretty taken with it since tracks started filtering out late last year. My line about Destroyer is that it’s what English majors should be listening to instead of the Decemberists. That’s as much a glib comparison as it is a cheap shot against a band I actively dislike, especially since they have very little in common besides being led by a nasal-voiced front man with a love for big words. I will allow, however, that I’ve never understood the point of Colin Meloy’s lyrics. To my ears, it exists for its own sake and since I maintain that Meloy rivals Jay Leno as the public figure in possession of the most punchable jaw, I’ll interpret that sake as personal edification. Bejar could be accused of similar things, though his elliptical lyrics and prismatic compositions transfix me. Notice how vast “Rubies” is in its first half, only to drop into disarming intimacy. A symphony folds into a four-track recording. Staggering.
I’m interested in Bejar’s artistic evolution, particularly after Your Blues. Derided in some circles as “the MIDI album”–a reference to the antiquated musical interface used to provide much of the album’s background music–many found this stylistic departure from his guitar-based compositions disconcerting. The rockist panic informing such aversion is pretty funny to me. Your Blues ranks among my favorite Destroyer records and warrants rediscovery. It’s clear with subsequent releases that while he may not have been using successive albums to respond to previous ones, he was building on certain ideas. Your Blues hardly sounds like a departure in context. The most reductive connection between Your Blues and Kaputt is that he’s channeling another outdated era of pop music production–one Mark Richardson places between 1977 and 1984, at the height of soft rock, smooth jazz, and new romantic pop. But Bejar’s always been interested in toying with outre musical ideas. Destroyer’s shimmering guitar lines recall 70s AOR staples like Bread and America, so his attempts at something we might call ambient yacht rock shouldn’t come as any surprise. Also, as an Electronic fan, I’m tickled that the New Order/Pet Shop Boys/Smiths’ side project is one of the album’s main musical reference points.
But what does come as something of a (pleasant) surprise to me is artist Kara Walker‘s presence on Kaputt. I had the privilege of seeing her My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love exhibit in 2008 at the Modern in Fort Worth. It remains my most disquieting spectatorial experience. Walker is best known for recasting Antebellum-era silhouette cutouts in cinematic tableaux to reinterpret America’s ongoing racist history (she also gets a shout-out in Le Tigre’s “Hot Topic”). Nightmarish visions of sexual violence and abjection twine with surrealist and sensual imagery that sneak up on you once you look past cultural associations with silhouette portraiture’s feminized gentility. That I saw this after looking at an Impressionist exhibit–and walking through the gift shop–at the nearby Kimbell Museum only put the vitality of the exhibit in sharper relief. There’s no way one of her murals could make it onto an umbrella.
Kara Walker's "Endless Conundrum, An African Anonymous Adventuress" (2001); image courtesy of walkerart.org
Perhaps related to serving as a curator for Merge Records’ retrospective, Walker contributed lyrics to “Suicide Demo for Kara Walker,” so named as a reference to the proto-punk duo. She wrote several charged phrases onto cue cards and Bejar sang them, rearranging and embellishing some passages. It’s easily my favorite song on the record, though I’m disquieted as to why. Ann Powers recently offered some insights into their collaborative effort, noting their shared interest in appropriation. Bejar has been compared to Leonard Cohen, particularly his detached narration of hedonistic tales. Soft rock’s seductive qualities–the backlit production, the reliance on 7th chords–disquiet in their efforts to soothe and drip sophistication, especially when Bejar whispers lines like “New York City just wants to see you naked and they will,” “wise, old, black, and dead in the snow,” “All that slender-wristed, white, translucent business passes for love these days,” and “Don’t talk about the South, she said.” Kaputt also prominently features vocalist Sibel Thrasher. In the context of this song, her presence calls into question the role many black female vocalists held as background singers for artists like Simply Red.
Cohen also comes to mind when we talk about reinterpretation. Many folks who’ve heard “Hallelujah” might attribute Jeff Buckley, but the song originated with Cohen (actually, Buckley’s version is a cover of a cover, as he cribbed John Cale’s reading of it). So what happens when lyrics are drafted by an African American woman whose words are then reinterpreted by a white Canadian man frolicking in the studio? Who does it belong to? Frankly, I’m not sure. I’m inclined to rule that it belongs to both of them and to the listener. What I know for certain is that this song is stuck on repeat.
Let me start this post by making it be about me, so that I can then make it be about somebody else. Last week, my writing kind of took a hit. I’m confident that my work is strong enough to take criticism. I’m also pretty lucky to have a supportive readership and not tangle too often with commenter vituperation the way so many other smart bloggers I know contend with on a regular basis. However, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t annoyed by charges against indulgent rhetoric that’s love-drunk on GRE words. It’s not inaccurate, but it seems sexist to knock a woman for using big words or bridge tenuous connections, especially one who grew up reading the work of music critics like Ann Powers. But folks hate on Joanna Newsom for throwing around words like “etiolated” in a song. But have you rolled that word around in your mouth? It’s kind of awesome.
I don’t mean to compare my prose to Newsom’s verse. Likewise, I don’t mean to suggest I’m in the same room as Throwing Muses founder Kristin Hersh, who is a queen of challenging song form. I just get where they’re coming from. It’s clumsy work to stumble into an elegant sentence. It’s embarrassing to write your feelings down and pass them over to someone else. It’s also liberating when you surprise yourself and tap into something unexpected and true. And as beloved as Hersh’s band was in the early offing, boy did she get shit for bending words. Witness Robert Christgau’s dismissal of her work as bad poetry.
Her elliptical flourishes are all over Rat Girl, an adaptation of her diary from age 18. It was a big year for her. She became friends with super-fan Betty Hutton, who she met while taking college courses. Her band (which she co-founded with stepsister Tanya Donelly) got signed to British underground powerhouse 4AD, then the first American band to hold the distinction. She also battled with bipolar disorder. I dealt with depression at 18 basically by retreating further under the covers to block out all the light that could seep into my pitch-black bedroom. She gave up lithium after becoming pregnant, confronting audiences, video directors, and producers with her pregnant belly.
Rat Girl is kind of hard to pin down for a review and I’m having trouble finding fault with it. I recommend Marisa Meltzer’s Slate write-up, which I linked in a previous post. Anyone familiar with Hersh’s rudderless songs can imagine that linear storytelling is not her thing. Yet I think this memoir gets closest inside the protagonist’s head, expanding and contracting as her mind ambles past the thoughts in her head with the actions that transpire between 1985 and 1986. I realize that drafting a list to break down what I liked about an autobiography as elliptical as Rat Girl doesn’t honor its spirit, but here goes.
1. Hersh’s candor toward her internal feelings about mental illness is astounding. Especially when she talks about not being able to see people like Hutton because she doesn’t want to burden her with her problems. Her empathic writing recalls Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Ariel. Yet I like that she’s always trying to shake off the black cloud hanging over her head or use it productively to her advantage. There’s claustrophobia, but she also acknowledges how time, setting, circumstance, and people allow a person’s perspective to shift and expand.
2. Since Hutton eventually calls Hersh out on going MIA after a particularly harrowing bout of depression, I’ll use this as a transition to say that I really like their kinship. They don’t seem to have much in common. Hutton often gives Hersh advice on stardom and glamour that her young charge doesn’t want to take, in part because she suspects such tips destroyed her mentor when she was a celebrity. Yet they get each other’s oddities on a fundamental level. 4AD co-founder Ivo Watts Russell connects with Hersh on a similar level. I appreciate that Hersh’s internal universe is conscious of this. Recognizing that some people really love you and are capable of staggering generosity is sometimes the one thing that lifts you out of your brain’s darkest depths.
3. Betty Hutton attending a Throwing Muses concert with gold hair and a priest as her plus one? Amen.
This woman would later go on to become one of the Throwing Muses' earliest fans; image courtesy of usatoday.com
3A. An early Throwing Muses show sounds epic. Their stage set-up included lights, projections, and a TV monitor blaring static with mannequin legs growing out from under it. If only I weren’t 2 in Houston and was 18 in Providence. I also wish I could have helped defend them against sexist, lazy sound guys but they held their own.
4. The Throwing Muses were a group of smart, considerate kids. When confronted with the news that Hersh is pregnant, they figure out how to play quietly so as not to disturb that baby and makes sure its mom gets plenty of rest. Disbanding is never an option because they’re committed to what they’re doing. I’m pretty sure most bands would have kicked Hersh out of the group she co-founded.
4A. Hersh loves how being pregnant makes her feel like a superhero. Likewise, her band mates are fascinated by it.
4B. It’s not commented upon, but my guitar instructor pointed out that they must have had tons of support from their parents. Gigging steadily and getting signed when you’re 18? Some older person cares, financially or otherwise.
4C. Hersh never really discusses her blended family with stepsister Donelly–only the one she formed with her, drummer Dave Narcizo, and bassist Leslie Langston. But I like the glimpses into their acquired sisterhood, like when New Englander Donelly corrects Atlantean transplant Hersh on the correct pronunciation of “thing” and tries to remove “ya’ll” from her vocabulary. Hersh’s defense of the offending second person plural term makes this Southern girl nod with approval.
5. I learned about the universal couch, which you can find in any venue. It’s something of a home for the band when they’re alone and a prison when they’re strapped to it by music journalists chasing the buzz while missing the point. Their line of questioning is often so wrong-headed and I love how Hersh and the Muses play around with them, especially when they make assumptions about Hersh’s feminist politics. I also love when Hersh says that she’s missing so much great, original music from the bands they’re touring with by being subjected to pointless interviews.
6. It’s never revealed who the father of her child is, nor does Hersh discuss what it was like to pick up the guitar at 14. They’re just facts. Hersh seems to have evolved past both of them. While I wanted to know more about how Hersh learned to master her instrument as someone almost a year into playing my Epiphone, I’m glad she bypassed the conventional narrative of a girl becoming self-actualized by her guitar. At 18, this was probably the farthest thing from her mind. Plus, rock journalists seem to be reminding her enough how exceptional it is to be a woman who plays electric guitar that she probably wanted to bury any recollection of the initial clumsiness that comes from developing the muscle memory to play scales, chords, and strumming patterns.
I'm not going to explain how I came to this instrument -- can't you tell what it means to me?; image courtesy of flickr.com
7. I love how she veers into tangents and mental in-roads about the nausea induced by the sight of greasy donuts or the thrill from swimming in violent, cold water or the exact color of a chord or the power of pausing to look at Christmas lights or how her band is like spinach or whatever else runs through her brain. Her (ugh) musings seem (ugh ugh) thrown together and edge toward hippie wisdom possibly inherited by her bohemian parents, except they’re often brave and profound. Again, the one thing I hope people take away from this book is what a great writer Hersh is. Some of the sentences she puts together absolutely floor me.
I know that Hersh’s book will be met with resistance. Some may think it’s just one structureless yarn from a talented white girl who’s making herself crazy. But I think her decision to write herself out of depression and soldier into her twenties with a band and a kid on her terms is pretty admirable. I believe the complicated ways in which she expresses and documents this exhilarating time is honest. I think she nails how time passes in life — that nothing seems to happen until everything transpires at once. For anyone who thinks they may relate to this great skein of an autobiography, I highly recommend it.
MAYA (N.E.E.T., XL, Interscope; 2010); image courtesy of wikimedia.org
Okay, so M.I.A.’s divisive third album, /\/\/\Y/\, has been out since early July. Its official release was on the 13th, though she “leaked” it on her MySpace page earlier in the month. Of course, the release of lead single “XXXO” and the music video for “Born Free” ramped up anticipation, as did her sound-bite shit-talk toward Interscope label mate Lady Gaga.
Pitch escalated when Lynn Hirschberg’s scandalous New York Times profile damaged the M.I.A.’s profile, prompting folks to provide advice for how to put her suddenly waning career back on track. Back in 2007, M.I.A., LCD Soundsystem, and Panda Bear topped many critics’ best-of lists (and dazzled this moi) with albums that expanded the studio boundaries of fringe-audience pop music. All of these artists release follow-ups this year. James Murphy has made it through his most recent foray relatively unscathed. I imagine that Panda Bear’s Tomboy will be kid-gloved as a musical evolution while M.I.A.’s self-titled /\/\/\Y/\ will be framed as a manic detour. How’s that for sexism?
I'm Panda Bear. Alyx will probably like my new album, though get mad at the undue praise it receives when compared to MAYA's relative critical failure; image courtesy of seattleweekly.com
I’ll admit some bias. I’ve been an M.I.A. fan since I saw two girlfriends execute the “Galang” dance with perfect synchronicity at a college party. Her first two albums rank amongst my favorites of the decade, though I’m always aware of how middle-class and white I am when I pump “Paper Planes” in my Mazda 626. But for me, there aren’t that many female artists at the level of fame she’s achieved who consistently relish in having pop culture ram against political insurrection. As Jessica Hopper put it in her review, she makes pop for capitalist pigs.
But I’ve also been critical of M.I.A. She was the subject of the first presentation I gave at a national conference. At the 2008 PCA/ACA conference, I proposed that her deliberate use of b-girl fashion projected a subversive racialized femininity. Predictably, this resulted in the Sri Lankan refugee turning outdated, second-hand designs into a hot commodity once she reached a certain level of fame, making her a hipster icon for designers like Marc Jacobs and retailers like American Apparel and Converse. Unfortunately, the current backlash was bound to happen.
I run this fuckin' club; image courtesy of thetripwire.com
Some folks wrote incisive commentary on Hirschberg’s article, evident in LaToya Peterson’s Jezebel article and Sady Doyle’s Tiger Beatdown piece. Unfortunately, the piece irrevocably skewed the reception of M.I.A.’s new album, forcing buried tensions to surface around the actual political merit of her artistic contributions that previously went unquestioned. Thanks to this article, many critics now seem to think she’s crazy, phony, constructed, and untalented (though unable to admit that they’ve been had, as Arular and Kala were almost unanimously praised). Much of this criticism seems short-sighted and blind to how popular opinion is engineered. Apart from explicit references to Hirschberg’s profile, its influence is particularly evident in the annoying ubiquity of the term “agit-prop,” which has lost all meaning for me.
So now that the album has been out for a few weeks and writers don’t have to play hand pile with Twitter, how about we calm down? M.I.A.’s third album is not that bad. Actually, it’s pretty good. More to the point, it’s remarkably consistent with her previous offerings, leading me to wonder why folks are just now getting annoyed with her tendency toward mock-incendiary sloganeering and posturing. Let’s put things in perspective, shall we?
Oh and let’s also get truffle oil French fries out of our minds as a symbol of her waning credibility. Like it’s hard to find a basket of those in Los Angeles. Matter of fact, I remember sharing a pizza topped with truffle “essence” at the Brick Oven before a Gravy Train!!!! show a few summers back. I was doing some contract voice-over work at the time, which wasn’t especially lucrative but could afford me to go in on a $10 pie. Also, I find Maya and fiancé/Seagram heir Ben Brewer’s decision to turn a Brentwood mansion into a squat for their friends a far more interesting application of wealth, perhaps more clearly indicating the couple’s political values.
If I rated things on a scale of 10, I’d give /\/\/\Y/\ a 7. It retains much of her signature while loosening its grip periodically to incorporate dub and industrial’s influence into her sound. It meanders a bit and lags toward the end in a free associative haze, not unlike fellow pop iconoclast and mother Erykah Badu’s New Amerykah Part Two. For me, its tangential feel simulates the non-linear nature of online interaction that’s foregrounded in the album art as well as the typing sounds and the mantra that comprise opening track “The Message”.
As an album, /\/\/\Y/\ doesn’t pack the immediate wallop of her first two albums — particularly the breakthrough Kala, which made her a household name and also guaranteed that she’d disappoint people after her Grammy performance, involvement with Slumdog Millionaire, and musical cameos in movie trailers.
However, I’d put the compressed energy of “Steppin’ Up,” “Born Free,” and “Meds and Feds” up there with “Bird Flu.” I also like the contrast with smoother numbers like “It Takes a Muscle,” “Tell Me Why,” and “Space.” I side with Ann Powers’s reading of “XXXO” as a statement about the problematic nature of constructing a pop star and a commentary about M.I.A.’s assumed role as a producer’s muse. I’m fine with the pro-weed chorus to “Teqkilla,” as it plays like a commentary on the post-ironic hipster inanity of a Nylon party that’s honoring her. And if Mark Richardson believes the lyric about Googling yourself in Discovery’s “Orange Shirt” captures “the low-level digitally assisted narcissism of the current age,” I wonder what he makes of M.I.A.’s line in “It Iz What It Iz” about having discussions with her partner while playing Wii.
Part of what prevented me from writing this piece earlier is the inability to reconcile her status as international pop star with her national heritage and cultural origins. Recently, I was having a sloshy party conversation with my friends Alex and Jessalynn about this problem. They proposed that M.I.A. has mythologized her family’s move from war-torn Sri Lanka to London to the point of distortion. They were skeptical of how she got to London, noting that her family must have some connections gained through privilege that the pop star is obscuring to lend credibility to the marginal cultural position she’s defined for herself. Fair point, because while London has a considerable immigrant population, I do wonder what educational programs were offered to a South London teenager that granted her enrollment at St. Martin’s College. I am also troubled by how a pop star is expected to speak on behalf of her home country’s systemic oppression, particularly as she grows more distant from its citizenry while exploiting a telegraphed representation of her heritage for profit.
Yet I find these set of issues especially interesting, particularly as many of our contemporary female pop stars make interchangeable hits about partying in appropriated pan-Native American couture or cupcake bras. I’ll take M.I.A.’s recent Late Show performance of “Born Free” over any of this nonsense. There may not have been gun shots to censor this time, but the army of M.I.A. avatars bested Eminem’s VMA performance of “The Real Slim Shady” and Suicide’s Martin Rev bleating out the sampled riff to “Ghost Rider” created televisual drama. M.I.A. might be a frustrating pop cultural figure and a guaranteed sell-out, but she’s far from boring.
Eminem and his gaggle of "oppressed" angry white male avatars failed to garner my sympathy, but they did get me to turn off the TV; image courtesy of buzzworthy.mtv.com
Funstyle (s-r; 2010); image courtesy of latimesblogs.latimes.com
Earlier this year, I wrote an entry for Bitch that considered Liz Phair’s burgeoning career as a TV composer. In that piece, I speculated that she started working in television for financial reasons, as she’d discussed elsewhere how indie cred doesn’t always pay your bills. This was confirmed in “Bollywood,” the first single of Phair’s sixth album Funstyle, which she released on her Web site last week. According to the message left on Phair’s Web site, we weren’t supposed to hear it and was responsible for her loss of management. I’m sure Funstyle‘s detractors can make hay of this.
Many have typed about ”Bollywood” in the week since. After my friend Erik alerted me of the track, I checked in with Chriso at I Fry Mine in Butter who provided scathing commentary and linked Phair’s output to the law of diminishing returns. A contact of mine at Bitch believed it was decent enough as a bonus track, but a bad lead single. Veteran music critics like Ann Powers and Douglas Wolk evaluated the album in full. Powers defended Phair’s artistic merit, referencing Dr. Demento while believing the work to be insightful, funny, and political. Wolk hoped it was a palette cleanser following the artist’s disappointing attempts at commercial success in the 2000s.
As for me? I’m certainly not going to begrudge Phair the opportunity to release new material. Record ’til you run out of songs, Liz. And in truth, I’ll probably always give anything you make at least one listen, because I try to give all female artists that courtesy. We can discuss the systemic failures that force a single mom to take jobs she may not otherwise consider and attempt at corporate solvency in order to provide for her family. We can debate whether breaking from Capitol Records and releasing the album to an unsuspecting public was a smart move when listening to “And He Slayed Her” (a dig on Capitol exec Andy Slater). We can encourage her to be critical about the music industry and how short a shelf life many female musicians have in it, as “Smoke” alludes to. I support her on all counts.
But if we’re purely talking about the album as a listening experience, I hardly enjoyed it. ”U Hate It,” Phair assumes in the opening track. Well, I certainly don’t love it. When it didn’t make my ears bleed, it bored me.
Much of what I didn’t like about the album was evident in “Bollywood”: Phair’s thoughtless racial appropriation. This is evident in the “ethnic” voice and grammar she employs while rapping, the broad humor she uses to cast evil record label execs as Noo Yawkahs (re: Jewish people), and her use of musical tokenism. It’s also evident in the title, whose only direct meaning is that the Hindi-language film industry (or ugly Americans’ notions of it) isn’t like the American culture industry that resides in a first-world cut-throat city posing as an idyll with which it rhymes. If you thought you wuz in the Bollywood, you wuzn’t. Let’s get real, Liz. You grew up in Winnetka as a member of a white upper-middle class family and went to Oberlin. You wuz never in the Bollywood and your conception of it and willingness to funnel it into a pop song is offensive.
Her tone-deaf racial ideations seem analogous to the condescending familial racial politics she offered on whitechocolatespaceegg‘s “Uncle Alvarez,” which told the story of a relative’s closeted Native American heritage. Though in fairness, Phair’s an equal-opportunity offender here. Suburban Midwestern housewives are her target in “Beat Is Up”. They sure talk funny when they offer hollow platitudes and mispronounce words while being cuckolded by their husbands and white-flight privilege, doncha know. But they’re such an easy target. Also, given how Phair is culturally insensitive in other ways, it seems like she may have more in common with these silly women than she may realize.
My disdain for Phair’s comedic sensibilities has deeper roots. She’s always entertained a broad sensibility that has gone largely undetected by her deadpan delivery. It’s most evident in her willingness to do voices, which goes at least as far back as “Why I Left California”.
And just because she’s deadpan doesn’t mean she’s always funny or insightful. On “U Hate It,” she admonishes music industry brass for being a “penius . . . colada that is.” This kind of faux-witty childish raunch didn’t curry favor with me when I watched Cougar Town or during the 45 minutes I could stomach of The Sweetest Thing. Phair is no exception. Frankly, I could draw a line between it and the awful “Polyester Bride” which boasts shallow lyrics about marked-down alligator boots and flirtatious bartenders as vessels for female empowerment. This doesn’t even get us into “H.W.C.” territory because . . . well, c’mon. You go girl. Or something.
When Funstyle didn’t make me wince with embarrassment, it left me with nothing else. The remainder of the album plays like the handful of unremarkable tracks on the sporadically great but overlong whitechocolatespaceegg or the majority of predecessor Somebody’s Miracle. Songs like “Satisfied,” “Miss September,” and “You Should Know Me” play like adult-contemporary album filler. It’s sad to me that Phair can’t provide interest for these songs, as I’m okay with “Why Can’t I” and “Soak Up the Sun,” a Sheryl Crow track she guested on. They weren’t favorites of mine, but I didn’t begrudge them their MOR success. She does take some other musical risks apart from rapping. This is most evident on “Oh, Bangaladesh” and “Bang! Bang!,” though only the latter urged me to listen again, as the former was another pan-Middle Eastern infused mess.
Maybe Phair is just being herself here, sending us postcards from some journey she’s on. I just wish I enjoyed reading her correspondence.
Cover to Have One on Me (Drag City, 2010); image courtesy of seajellyexhibit.blogspot.com
As I’ve mentioned earlier, I’ve long been on the fence about Joanna Newsom. I remember playing “Bridges and Balloons” from The Milk-Eyed Mender once when I was still at KVRX. Her name had been bandied about in hushed, reverent tones by fellow deejays and I had to find out who was causing this kind of fuss. Upon first listen, I promptly thought to myself, “what is this art school pixie nattering on about? Is this some Nellshit? More like Joanna Nuisance.” Immediately after the song finished, a female listener called to thank me for playing the song, espousing its beauty with complete sincerity. Yeesh. Point taken, sister. I took a little more time with Ys, but wasn’t converted.
My flippancy might seem unjustified given my professed adoration for Björk, and I recognize that. Bottom line: I respected that Newsom was a rare talent, but I didn’t get her appeal. In theory, I’m down with Lisa Simpson playing a harp, but actual listening didn’t beget actual enjoyment.
So when I found out Newsom’s long-awaited follow-up would be a triple album, I was like “ho boy, that’s going to be a lot of obscure words and ululating.”
It is, but in a great way.
I’ve since spent the last week listening to her new album, Have One on Me and feel like I need to check back in with Ys. For smart criticism on Have One on Me, I’ll gladly refer you to reviews from Ann Powers, Jonah Weiner, and Mark Richardson. Oscillating almost exclusively between it and Dessa’s A Badly Broken Code, that’s a lot of time with two smart women’s words. It was a week well spent and has carried over into this one. I’m certain that these two albums are the ones I’ll treasure from this year.
One reason I was able to warm up to Have One on Me is because it’s “accessible,” at least comparatively speaking. Some might interpret this as a taming of Newsom’s sound. Her voice is more controlled. Her arrangements, though spare in a way that recalls The Milk-Eyed Mender, are approachable and gorgeous. They even suggest a pop sensibility that gestures toward a potential connection between her and Carole King and Joni Mitchell’s work in the early 70s. I think all of this does a service to what are ultimately straightforward songs about the complexities of adult relationships. She’s not accessible so much as she is direct.
In addition, I think my attitudes toward pretension have changed since I last considered Newsom. I’ve spent some quality time with Kate Bush and Elizabeth Fraser, post-punk’s grand-mères of affectation. Song cycles about drowning? Lyrics pieced together out of gibberish, abstruse terminology, random words, and antiquated names? Hello.
These considerations have prompted me to stretch back toward Mitchell. They’ve led me to reconsider favorites like Björk, PJ Harvey, and Neko Case. I celebrate contemporary artists like Bat For Lashes, Fever Ray, Antony Hegarty, and Julianna Barwick with renewed vigor. I even volley contradictory opinions about Lady Gaga. In fact, after Newsom I should revisit Patti Smith and Tori Amos to see if my opinions of them have changed. I might want to see who this Amanda Palmer person is all about too.
I’m interested in how these artists use pretension for two reasons. For one, I like the effrontery of female musicians whose work seems to bellow, “I’m an artist with a capital A. My music is really important and great. If I need my work to be excessively florid, doggedly conceptual, or sonically challenging, then you can deal. If there was room for prog rock, there’s room for me too. In fact, I am prog rock. No, I have eaten prog rock, along with the book Roan Press published that exalts my genius.”
More to the point, when pretension is used in the service of songs about female experiences, it seems as though there’s potential for the mundane yet particular realities of being female to contain artistry, fantasy, and perhaps even transcendence. In Newsom’s case, as the record is teeming with reflections on motherhood, the pressures of couplehood between creative people, and the struggle for women to maintain autonomy as they mature, the pretensions feel earned.
That said, my threshold for pretension is slanted by my gendered purview. Newsom stretches odes to break-ups, possible abortions, empty rooms, and the West Coast well past the three-minute mark here and I listen. When it’s Decemberists’ leader Colin Meloy, I want to stab him so he’ll quit singing or reaching for his thesaurus. “Forty-winking in the belfry,” indeed.
Of course, while I may approve of female pretension, I also have to check it. Here’s where Annabel Mehran’s album cover seems necessary to consider. Newsom is draped across a chaise, suggesting an archetype in portraiture known as the Odalisque. Strewn about her are knickknacks from a decadent bohemian lifestyle — shawls, rugs, lamps, pelts, stuffed animals, antiques, a peacock.
To me, the image composition most clearly brings to mind Henri Rousseau‘s “The Dream.” Erté may also be an influence, as Newsom is fashioned a bit like his “Scandinavian Queen.” The political implications of these artists’ styles, and their respective involvement with Post-Impressionism and Art Deco should not be overlooked, particularly with regard to race. The former was notorious for its problematic, first-world fetishization of its own notions of primitivism. The latter poached quite a bit from Japanese woodcuts, thus perpetuating Orientalism. Indeed, when you juxtapose Newsom’s alabaster complexion against her exotic surroundings, the racial implications of female pretense become troubling. Who is afforded the time to ruminate? Who gets to lie in repose?
Henri Rousseau's "The Dream"; image courtesy of wikimedia.org
With that said, the cover, like the contents of the album, are beautiful, troubling, and revealing. They demand considerable examination and they’re getting it from at least one listener.
Just wanted to make sure you all heard about the unofficial Lady Gaga dolls created by Veik11, which I saw one friend post on another friend’s Facebook page earlier this morning. If not, Perez Hilton is excited about them. As with all things Gaga, I’m ambivalent. While my overall opinion isn’t too different from how I felt about Mattel’s Ladies of the ’80s collection, I have a few notes particular to Gaga in doll form. Pros and cons time.
Pros
1. I like the DIY spirit of Veik11′s dolls and his approach to fandom. Better a Bratz or Barbie doll be turned into Gaga by the owner than stay a Bratz or Barbie doll. I can only hope girls and boys were this creative in turning their gifts into artistic projects.
2. Likewise, better she be outfitted in crazy, homemade versions of Gaga couture than the store-bought glittery pink duds she tends to wear in the box.
3. I like the idea that any doll can be turned into Gaga, regardless of color. In fact, having a black or Latina Gaga might ease some of the blonde white lady racial tension she inherited from Madonna.
Cons
1. Even better if a Ken doll be turned into Gaga, don’t you think? I do.
2. Let’s ugly Gaga up a bit more, shall we? Cover her in more blood, dye some of her hair black or purple, and give her a longer nose. In short, make her more grotesque. In doing so, owners might be honoring their burgeoning feminist idol while at the same time challenging the normative constructs of both the doll and the girl in her.
3. Give her a band or something. Maybe bring in a stuffed animal to play kazoo. Maybe have a Groovy Girl on the drums. Let’s just make sure that the diva doesn’t have to stand alone.
4. Barbie doesn’t have to be Gaga. She can be whatever the owner wants her to be, whether it’s a sleeping companion, a boy, a drag queen, the first female President of the United States, an audience for his or her unseen short film, or a discarded figure on the floor.
William Miller, Stillwater, and the Band-Aids, on the road; image courtesy of redriverautographs.wordpress.com
All right, folks. I’m home with the sniffles, so let’s roll up our sleeves for this one. I recently re-watched my VHS copy and am ready to get into it. At length. Double-album style. Watching the movie on video means I didn’t listen to any DVD commentaries to formulate my thoughts. And while I have seen the Untitled version, my opinions will mostly be generated from the theatrical release version. Keep this in mind reading on, but feel free to mix it up in the comments section.
Now, this is a movie that pushes and pulls me like few other. As I’ve grown older, depending on how I felt when I watched it, I waft somewhere between charitable introspection and vitriolic rejection, one time even going so far as drunkenly telling a friend who likes this movie to shut up (sorry, Leigh!).
I wasn’t always this way. When it first came out during my senior year of high school, I looooooooved it. I saw it with my best friend Jamie and a boy I would later regret dating. Jamie was the editor of the school newspaper. I made my extracurricular committment to choir, but wished I had room in my class schedule to write for The Clarion. I wanted to be William Miller, the fifteen-year-old journalist protagonist who fills in for director Cameron Crowe and his own (idealized?) experiences as a writer. Figuring I could catch up in college, I set my sights on UT’s journalism school. By graduation, I assumed I’d be working as a rock critic in New York City, perhaps following bands like Stillwater, the fictitious classic rock band based on The Allman Brothers Band that breaks (then promises to make) Miller’s career.
My hope of being a rock journalist was officially dashed the second time I was not hired as a writer for The Daily Texan‘s entertainment section. After this rejection, 19-year-old me reasoned that these fat cats were shills for the man with terrible taste in music. I might have even phrased it that way at the time. From here, I officially cast my lot with college radio.
It’s important to bring up music journalism, not only to burn on it out of bitter feelings of rejection. When this movie originally came out, it was a dangerous time for print publications like Rolling Stone and Spin, much like the early 70s was a dangerous time for rock music. 1973, the year this movie takes place, was a harbinger of the bloated, corporate, cool-hunting enterprise the mainstream music industry would become. By 2000, it had completely transformed into a deregulated, conglomerate behemoth, peddling a handful of marketable, palatable, and safe talent that could sell ancillary products and jack up the retail prices on those ancillary products, which the compact disc had become. Music listeners, irritated by ever-higher CD prices, began downloading illegally in earnest. Sometimes they were met with arrests and lawsuits. Sometimes those lawsuits were filed by the popular musicians they idolized. As a result of these actions, and some truly stupid strategies the music industry has used to push units, people are more incredulous of the music industry than ever.
It’s important to bring in the Internet and the ubiquity of digital technology too, as online communication affected print journalism. Throughout the 2000s, publications scrambled to keep up circulation and readership. Some were bought and sold to other conglomerates. Some turned from monthlies to quarterlies. Some drastically changed their content and marketing campaigns (the saddest one for me was Spin, a high school favorite that was Rolling Stone‘s cool, younger sibling; by the time I entered graduate school, it packaged itself as the hipster version of Us and lagged behind e-zines like Pitchfork and Tiny Mix Tapes in its coverage of new music).Some shilled out to reality TV (looking at you, Rolling Stone). Some simply folded.
Along with publications, staffs shrunk due to budget cuts. Some folks survived the fall-out. Rob Sheffield came into the field from the academy and penned a touching memoir. Eric Weisbard became part of the academy, currently an American Studies professor at the University of Alabama. Some folks, like Sarah Lewitinn and Chuck Klosterman, became cults of personality. But others didn’t fare as well. Sia Michel lost her position as Spin‘seditor-and-chief, though was hired on to be The New York Times‘ pop music editor. At some places, an entertainment staff was whittled down to one person, if there was a department at all.
Sarah Lewitinn, aka Ultragrrrl; image courtesy of daylife.com
With the implosion of print-based music journalism came the advent of e-zines like Pitchfork and, of course, blogs. These folks, for good or for bad, may shape what criticism will look like in this century. I, for one, do see some good to blog culture (barring, you know, my recent public involvement with it). The principle assets I have found with it are its immediacy and DIY ethic. I couldn’t get a staff position at the Texan. I wasn’t financially able to take an internship. In short, traditional modes of ascension in the field weren’t available to me or many others. But blogging allows (some) writers to continue researching, hone their craft, and figure out just why they’re so interested in their subject of analysis.
Of course, there are hazards to blogging. Our collective attention span for new sounds has diminished. Furthermore, a considerable amount of misinformation gets reported. However, while I’m tempted to attribute this to a lack of fluency with journalistic principles of investigating, reporting, and fact-checking, I don’t know if it’s that simple. I’d hasten to point out that blogging and traditional journalism are both vulnerable to errors, unfair coverage, unequal time, and other ethical issues in the wake of the 24-hour news cycle.
In short, I watch this movie and think three things: 1) I don’t know if William Miller would be a journalist today, as the publications he would want to work at might not be able to hire him, 2) I do think he’d be a blogger, as the fan-critic and musician-journalist binaries in media culture have been considerably blurred since the early 70s, and 3) while this movie seems quaint in its depiction of a just-booming American music industry, it still seems completely relevant, maybe even more so than when the movie was originally released.
So, you would think based on all of this fodder, I’d love this movie. But it’s not so simple and the movie itself is only partly at fault. A major issue I have with the movie isn’t so much to do with its gender politics as it is with the gender politics of its fanboys. I have heard too many fanboys talk about this movie with fervor, as if God touched Cameron Crowe’s camera. They’ll regale folks with abstruse bits of commentary from the Untitled version and quiz people on what songs like Stillwater’s “Love Thing” and “Fever Dog” are really about (I think love and kicking addiction, respectively). They are often humorless, especially if you point out any similarities they might have to Vic Munoz, the movie’s Led Zeppelin devotee. Oh, and they always love Led Zeppelin. Always.
But Alyx. Smelly zealot fanboys shouldn’t keep you from liking a movie, you say. The movie has a lot of good things going for it, you add. There’s even a lot of interesting female characters walking around, being smart and human and brave, you note. You might even say they’re more interesting than altruistic protagonist William Miller, you whisper emphatically. Fair points all. So, let’s do what Mary Kearney did when I watched this movie in her gender and rock undergrad class and run through the women and girls we meet in Miller’s coming-of-age story. Note that many of them are autonomous beings, free agents on the road:
1. The Band-Aids, especially one Penny Lane (played by Kate Hudson in what many argue is her only credible screen performance). They are not groupies and consider themselves fans who are autonomous, exercise sexual agency, and are not disposable, though some musicians have trouble seeing them the way they see themselves.
1A. While Penny Lane is clearly the Band-Aid leader, I’ve always loved Sapphire (played by Fairuza Balk). Label it blonde antipathy or brunette solidarity, but it’s hard not to love this rough, mischievous, funny, and wise lady. Can you imagine the stories she could tell? She intimates with William’s mother about his travels on the road and how she should be proud of her son from a hotel phone. She’s responsible for orchestrating the orgy that takes William’s (who she calls “Opie“) virginity. She’s also the one who delivers the hard truth about Penny and William to guitarist Russell Hammond. And she’s the one who insists that younger groupies take birth control, appreciate the music, and quit eating all the steak at crafts’ services.
2. Alice Wisdom, a deejay whose playlist Lester Bangs rudely rejects. Now I don’t like The Doors either, Lester, but that doesn’t mean you should shout over her opinions and discredit her taste in music. Unless you’re actually discrediting the radio station’s taste in music, in which case the deejay’s role becomes even more compromised. And this woman is already compromised by having the regulatory whiskey-throated voice that all female deejays seem required to have or emulate.
3. High school girls running for gym class. Stillwater bassist Larry Fellows perks up at the view from the tour bus; Penny Lane gives them the finger, glad that she’s playing hooky. That she’s not them.
4. Fans. Some of whom are Band-Aids or groupies, most of whom are regular girls and women with jobs and parents.
5. Band wives and girlfriends. They were there before the band got signed, are not often there for the shenanigans on the road, and probably won’t be there after the break-ups and divorces.
6. A particularly shrill feminist stereotype of a Rolling Stone journalist billed as Alison the Fact Checker. Sadly, she probably has to be in order to be heard in staff meetings. Plus, wouldn’t you be pissy if you were trying to forge a career, were all-too-cognizant of sexism and misogyny, but also loved writing about popular music? This is a question I’ve always wanted to ask Ann Powers, Dream Hampton, and Lorraine Ali.
"How do you do it, Dream Hampton?"; image courtesy of thestartingfive.net
7. A singer-songwriter jamming with another singer-songwriter who appear to be modeled after Emmylou Harris and Gram Parsons. William sees them playing in a hotel room during his first visit at the Riot House.
8. William’s big sister, Anita. She has a turbulent relationship with her mother and leaves home to become a flight attendant, leaving her kid brother a haul of amazing records, including Joni Mitchell’s Blue. She even gives him some good advice about how to listen to The Who’s Tommy that seems to have a lasting impression.
9. And, of course, William’s awesome, anti-establishment, overprotective mother Elaine, who is a college professor in San Diego. She is also the family matriarch, and probably was even before her husband died. Besides Lester, Ms. Miller is one of the few rebels. They both hold the distinction of being the only people who recognizes that rock culture, and its attendant cheap thrills and promises, is just another corporate enterprise.
Now, now. The dudes are interesting too, you might say. And masculinity is a discursive minefield here. So let’s walk through it. Let’s make like the movie and use William Miller to do this.
1. Miller himself is a soft-eyed, feminine boy played by then-unknown Patrick Fugit. He is hopelessly in love with Penny, a girl who may be his age but is out of his depth and hopelessly in love with someone else.
William Miller and his quest for truth; image courtesy of blog.lib.umn.edu
2. Billy Crudup’s Russell Hammond is the talented, aloof, and cowardly lead guitarist for Stillwater. He’s technically better than his bandmates, and is quick to hover it over them. He takes William under his wing because he’s a fan, only to dismiss him when Bob Dylan makes an appearance at Max’s Kansas City. He also nearly ruins William’s journalistic integrity when his own credibility is on the line. He’s also in love with Penny, but more in love with becoming a rock star. He’s not so in love with his wife, Leslie. He loves himself more than anyone, and hates himself for it.
3. Stillwater lead singer Jeff Bebe (Jason Lee) feels differently toward Leslie. He also has considerable animosity toward Hammond, whose emergent fame and skill is threatening to eclipse him and the rest of the band.
4. Bassist Larry Fellows and drummer Ed Vallencourt round out the band. Fellows (played by singer-songwriter Mark Kozelek, who I named my cat after) seems only interested in barbeque and high school girls. Vallencourt (played by John Fedevich) is silent through most of the movie, until he announces that he’s gay during a traumatic airplane ride.
5. Dick Roswell (Noah Taylor) and Dennis Hope (Jimmy Fallon) manage the band. Fellows has been with them for most of their career. Hope convinces the band to cash in and sell out, most symbolically by trading their bus for a jet. They will regret this decision.
6. Jann Wenner and Ben Fong-Torres, Rolling Stone‘s respective editor-and-chief and senior editor, who serve as William’s bosses. Note the Wenner is gay, though at this time in his career, he was married to a woman named Jane. They would go on to have three children before divorcing in 1995. I haven’t read anything on Wenner, but am fascinated to learn how he negotiated all of this. Note also that Fong-Torres is Chinese American and one of the few people of color in both the movie and perhaps the emerging mainstream rock music industry. Note also the “Torres” surname, which his father adopted, dropping “Fong,” in order to pose as a Mexican in order to be granted U.S. citizenship while Chester Arthur’s Chinese Exclusion Act was still on the books. The family later kept both surnames.
Stillwater, on the cover of Rolling Stone; image courtesy of jeffdurling.com
But William doesn’t really have much in common with Stillwater. He wants to be them, but is in actual fact a music geek. Two like-minded male characters empathize, and share a relationship that is at once classically masculine in its indexical organization of rock’s ephemera and, at the same time, feminine in their romantic, homoerotic obsessive fandom.
1. Lester Bangs, William’s mentor, played by the formidable Philip Seymour Hoffman, who is one of the main reasons I’ll be seeing Pirate Radio. Reportedly, his scenes were filmed while he had the flu. Bangs hates what rock journalism has become.
Lester Bangs imparting life lessons to William Miller; image courtesy of playground.chronicleblogs.com
2. Vic Munoz, played by longtime Apatow mainstay Jay Baruchel. He’s the Zeppelin fan who follows the band everywhere, clutches a marker frontman Robert Plant once held, and wears his “Have you seen the bridge?” t-shirt at all times.
I should point out, however, that the girls index too. Penny Lane may not want William to take notes during Stillwater concerts, but that doesn’t mean that she, her peers, or William’s sister Anita, can’t rattle off band line-ups, industry players, and song lyrics.
And lest we forget that William actually forges strong relationships with his sister, his mother, and the Band-Aids. While Sapphire, Polexia, and the gang seduce William, they also believe in him, intimate secrets with him, and provide him support, though they sometimes treat him as a minion and less as an equal.
I should also point out, since I opined that Miller doesn’t have much in common with Stillwater, that he does have an interesting relationship with Hammond nonetheless. Miller, a kid brother with an older sister, doesn’t seem to have any male friends or role models before he takes Bangs’s assignment to cover Black Sabbath for Creem, a band for whom Stillwater is opening and launches Miller’s almost-too-good-to-be-true feature assignment for Rolling Stone.
I wouldn’t necessarily categorize Hammond as a friend or role model. Perhaps he’s better suited for an older brother position. At first, Miller looks up to Hammond, calling his guitar-playing “incendiary” and trying (largely in vain) to emulate his slingin’, ’stached bravado. But, despite a Band-Aid orgy (controlled by the women who believe that “Opie must die”), Miller clearly doesn’t have that kind of swagger. He also doesn’t seem to want it, seeing Hammond’s cowardice beneath it. He also recognizes the irony of such inauthentic displays of machismo and ego in a form supposedly as authentic, romantic, and pure as rock is supposed to be, and is quickly unbecoming. Perhaps he also notices the rigid gender roles and chauvinism that inform the supposed gains of free love and the sexual revolution. This hypocrisy, along with the band’s quick rejection of real fans for industry success and the promise of rock mythology, make Miller able to put Hammond and his band mates in their place during the climactic plane scene. His honesty and integrity also earns him their trust, especially Hammond’s, who finally grants him a real interview at the end of the movie.
As an aside, if Hammond is Miller’s imperfect older brother, he steps right into the role by sassing Ms. Miller when he first talks to her on the phone, immediately snapping into a “yes ma’am, no ma’am” routine when she admonishes his behavior and values.
Miller’s character also wins the respect of Penny Lane, even when she’s ignoring the icky realities of seeing yourself as a fan but being treated as a groupie, as disposable as a real Band-Aid.
Note that it doesn’t win Lane’s affections, at least not physically. She may be too hard for or scared of Miller’s feelings (which are announced, unfortunately, in a scene where Miller kisses Lane, who just overdosed on Quaaludes). She may not be ready for rejecting her own rock star mythology in order to be truly intimate with someone (though she suggests she might when she tells Miller that she came into this world as one Lady Goodman). Maybe doing so would make her the typical teen she (and William’s mother) see little value in becoming. Maybe not consummating this relationship suggests they have no interest in typical interactions with one another.
Yet Miller’s and Lane’s relationship, which seems built on male fantasy, is an issue I have with this movie. I don’t get what the fuss is about, frankly. I understand that Lane is pretty, savvy, and well-traveled, but don’t understand why Miller has such a crush on her, primarily because I don’t understand how loving a band’s music leads you toward doing their ironing backstage while the boy you love in the band can’t be bothered to love you back. More importantly, I don’t know who she really is. Maybe the self-mythology is part of what prevents me (and certainly Miller) from getting close. Maybe the challenge of trying to find out who the real Penny Lane is warrants enough of a fascinating exercise for Miller. And maybe it isn’t any of our business who Lane really is. But I sort of wonder if she’s perfectly matched with Hammond, a man who wants desperately to be the myth he’s created for himself. Maybe this suggests that both of them have something in common with Don Draper. Here’s one scene where I think Lane, alone after a concert, drops the masquerade (note that the scene follows Stillwater’s treacherous meeting with super-manager Hope).
Admittedly, perhaps my problem resides in Kate Hudson’s performance. Perhaps I want her not to channel her mother, herself a manic pixie dream girl of this era, so much. Perhaps I’m projecting Goldie Hawn’s presence and ignoring how Hudson is making this role her own. I do think Hudson does a good job balancing Lane’s contrasts and contradictions, perhaps a better job than Kirsten Dunst (who almost got this role, but was cast in Crowe’s Elizabethtown instead) would.
And I do think I’m being unfair in my dismissal of Kate Hudson and Penny Lane. Because I think my real problem, as it usually is with Crowe’s movies, is the director’s unfortunate habit of crutching on the magic of pop music. Admittedly, this might be a hard habit for a music geek director to break, but it has kept me from enjoying his other movies (including, yes, Say Anything). And it’s probably contradictory for a music fan not to like pop music playing such a pronounced role in Crowe’s work. To me, however, Crowe’s use of pop music suggests the necessity of delicate application. Because I hate how he uses Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” in one of the movie’s big reconciliatory moments, as its obvious that he is making the case for how pop music’s universality heals all psychic wounds. When Lane tells Miller that he is home, all I can think is “fucking duh.”
While I feel like the movie’s score adds to the treacle (especially during the scene when Miller runs with Lane’s departing plane), I do admire Cameron Crowe’s ongoing collaborations with wife and Heart guitarist Nancy Wilson. We’d do well to remember Wilson’s rock legend status, score work, and Crowe’s relationship with Wilson when making sexist assumptions about Sofia Coppola’s relationship with Phoenix’s Thomas Mars, who is working on her next movie, Somewhere. We might also like to keep it in mind when thinking about Karen O’s involvement in ex-boyfriend Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are.
Going back to Crowe’s unfortunate flirtations with the obvious for my closing remarks, he does make a few other points in this movie in highlighter yellow that I love anyway. So much so that I’ve shaped my life around them. In the interest of full disclosure, I will share them now, suggesting that sometimes flirtations with the obvious are essential and humane.
1) The introductory scene between Bangs and Miller, when Bangs talks about staying up all night, writing about music. Whether or not he was high on cough syrup and speed or the tomes he devoted to The Faces or John Coltrane were dribble didn’t matter. The objective, as William knows well, is ”just to fuckin’ write.” It’s an objective I know well too. It’s a key reason why I put this blog together in the first place, and I’m certainly not alone.
2) Lane has a great line as well, one that has stayed with me as I age. I’m a firm believer in the advice she gives Miller when she drives them to the Riot House: ”if you ever get lonely, you just go to the record store and visit your friends.” The comfort I have found in record stores cannot be overstated, and I only hope that, as I get older, at least a few of them don’t get completely mowed down to make way for more lucrative businesses. I might have to stay in a city that shares kinship with Austin to assure this, but I think it’s worth it. I’d rather live in a city that appreciates the cultural and communal value of record stores over a city that only sees value in their market returns.
After all this, I believe Almost Famous to be an interesting and challenging movie at times marred by its idealism, sentimentality, and emphasis on one very lucky boy’s experience following around a band and writing down what happened. Thus, it’s a movie I keep coming back to, even if I don’t feel the need to replace the tape.
This post is really two posts. The first section preoccupies itself with why album covers matter culturally, so as to set up a discussion of a particularly interesting album cover, in this case Kate Bush’s 1982 release, The Dreaming, which I focus on in the second section. I intend to discuss more album covers throughout the duration of this blog’s livelihood. If you would like to throw out suggestions or contribute a piece, feel free. Contact me at feministmusicgeek@gmail.com.
One thing that I fear is leaving our popular consciousness in the digital age is the album cover. I don’t consider myself a technophobe and hardly think music videos (once on TV, now on the Web) contributed to the downfall of album packaging (I actually think that’s the fault of record labels who keep raising their retail prices). Yet I do worry what we’ll lose if we stop caring about album covers. Growing up, Madonna had some of the most interesting album covers ever. So imagine how bummed I was when I saw her slapped-together, clumsily Photoshopped cover for Hard Candy. Sigh.
Cover for Hard Candy; released in 2008 on Warners Bros.
Now I know that avering my love for album covers may cast me as a bit of a commodity fetishist (which I kinda am, despite how problematic it is). And I get why album covers don’t take priority. For one, market imperative — covers cost money and the more elaborate they are, the more expensive they can become (just ask the folks at Factory Records; for every sold copy of New Order’s “Blue Monday” — lavishly designed by Peter Saville to look like a floppy disc — the label lost money, though was more concerned in releasing a well-made, lovingly-crafted piece of popular art than in turning a profit). Also, the reliance of plastic for packaging can be less than environmentally friendly (though kudos to many musical acts, artists, and record labels for realizing this and phasing it out with more paper printing).
Cover for An Invitation by Inara George; released in 2008 on Everloving with paper cover
But album covers reveal so much — who the artist is, what the music is going to sound like, what the theme or concept behind the album might be, who made the cover art, the evolution of print technology, the history of album packaging, indeed how valuable packaging may have been to the people and companies responsible for release. And obviously, in terms of representational politics, album covers can tell stories, share folklore, provide commentary, project alternate realities, or rebel. Bottom line: they’re texts and we shouldn’t overlook them or what they may reveal about the artists, the markets, and the fan bases. If interested, I highly recommend Steve Jones and Martin Sorger’s essay “Covering Music: A Brief History and Analysis of Album Cover Design.”
Treatise endeth. New treatise begineth.
One such album cover I’d like to look at is Kate Bush’s The Dreaming. Now, I’m a bit new to her, but not exactly. I have kind of a greatest hits awareness of her. As a girl, I made up dance routines in my room to “Rubberband Girl” and “Running Up That Hill” when they (rarely) got played on the radio. I know she was discovered by Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour at an early age and recorded her first album, The Kick Inside, as a teenager. I know that she produces her own material. I know that she’s a trained interpretive dancer and worked with Lindsay Kemp, David Bowie’s choreographer. I know that she directed and starred in a short film called The Line, the Cross, & the Curve co-starring Miranda Richardson based on songs from her 1993 album The Red Shoes. I know she’s done some bugged-out music videos. For example:
And then I know what other people think of her. I know a lot of negative things. Characters in books like Bret Easton Ellis’s The Rules of Attraction and Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity hate on her music. Likewise, people like to throw around rumors that, due to her perfectionism in the studio and her penchance for writing songs about female suffering and neuroses, mythological women, and the paranormal, she is crazy. It’s all crazy sexist. On that tip, I was friends with a girl who said of Bush, “Ugh, Lilith Fair.”
And then the positives. I know that a lot of people mention her when they talk about Tori Amos (and now, St. Vincent and Bat for Lashes). I’ve read some academic work (specifically Debi Withers’s piece on queer subjectivity in her second album, 1978′s Lionheart, and Holly Kruse’s “In Praise of Kate Bush,” which considers Bush’s authorial status, from the anthology On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word). I know that Ann Powers, a rock journalist I idolized growing up, is writing a 33 1/3 book on The Dreaming (expect a future post upon its release next year — I’m way stoked).
And then I know male artists who have sited her as an influence. There’s L.A. outsider art rocker Ariel Pink, who borrows her treble-heavy, lo-fi, avant pop production sensibilities and clearly positions himself as a fan.
Hmmm. Guess I knew more than I thought. Yet, I’d never actually listened to an entire Kate Bush album. So, I thought I’d start with The Dreaming, which is really great. It’s kinda crazy how influential and varied and timeless this music is — I haven’t had a listening experience with so many “aha” and “so this is where ______ came from” moments since I first heard The Velvet Underground’s debut album the summer before college. But that was all happy accident. I picked it because a) it’s widely regarded by music critics as a masterpiece, b) indeed, Powers is writing about it, c) it marks a transition for Bush as producer as well as singer and instrumentalist, and d) the cover.
Cover for The Dreaming; released on EMI in 1982
This cover (made by Kindlight) knocks me out. I’ve stared at so much in the past few weeks — after several years of looking at it in various record stores — and only recently figured out that it’s supposed to be Houdini and his wife (indeed, there is a song called “Houdini” on the album, told from his wife’s perspective). The shackles around him are to be broken using the key, which Bush (as Bess Houdini) has in her mouth. But I always thought she had a wedding ring in her mouth and was internally debating whether or not to put it on (and perhaps be shackled) or swallow it and flee.
I suppose it could work either way. It’s also possible that Bush and Bess Houdini have suddenly become self-conscious about the inherent performativeness of their careers (musicians, like magicians, trade in trickery). There’s also the possibility that the key takes on some sort of sexual, Freudian design as a symbol and that the juxtaposition of the key, the shackles, her tongue, and her lusty proximity to Houdini may be at odds with her Victorian dress, coinciding at once with Houdini’s era, Bush’s origins as a Brit, and Bush’s lyrical preoccupations. All readings are valid, as they peak curiosity and dialogue with the music. Indeed, they are part of the music. Part of this woman’s work.
